What's needed is to make sure everyone in an organization, government included, contributes value at least equal to what they're paid

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Don Wright, former head of British Columbia’s public service and deputy minister to the premier, wrote a very true thing here the other day. In “creating jobs,” he wrote, governments shouldn’t forget basic math. The quotation marks are because governments don’t actually create jobs, they merely shuffle resources around, discouraging some activities with rules and taxes and encouraging others with subsidies, tax credits and so on.

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In some industries, wages and tax revenues are high; in others, not so much. If governments squeeze the first kind of industry — oil and gas, for instance — and funnel resources into the second — filmmaking, in one of Wright’s examples — that will have consequences. Such a policy will destroy some high-paying, high-revenue-generating jobs and “create” other not so high-paying, not so high-revenue-generating jobs. There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, Adam Smith wrote. If you’re a rich place, maybe you can afford such indulgences. But even in rich places there may eventually be limits.

You might take from this that governments should get into the business of maximizing the wage and tax payoffs from the kinds of jobs they try to........

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